Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if you use SponsorBlock. Been using it for months, it greatly improves the youtube experience.
And greatly removes the way these creators can actually pay for their lifestyle of creating. Good job!
Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
181–190 of 194 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#182People are mentioning technical & payment processing hurdles, but those are all easy to figure out. Look at the gaming industry, mobile app stores, iTunes, online gambling, toll booths, tipping on various online platforms. Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while. A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee…
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#183I read through a ton of comments and didn't see anyone really mention twitch. On twitch you can buy with credit card bits. A bit is about 1 penny. But you usually buy $5 bits incrementally. You can watch ad for 10 bits sometimes too. You can then give anywhere from 1 bit to whatever to the streamer. Some streamers will set minimums of 5 or 25 bits. At end of month the bits are converted back to real money minus twitc…
That would work if it was like: I pre-load money into a service (i.e paypal). Then I use that account to unlock articles/donate to many different sites. Then, at the end of the month, paypal (or whatever the service is) makes 1 payment to all those sites, for all users combined.
That way, instead of me transferring 1 cent, twice, to New York Times, Paypal could do 1 large transfer of all contributions.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are miners incentivized to maintain the network?
I was curious and looked into this myself. According to Coinbase[1]: > users provide the computational power required to verify their own transactions, allowing transactions to be processed without fees [1] https://www.coinbase.com/price/nano
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#185You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small. I think the endless discussion of a desire for "micropayments" is just another excuse for "We don't really want to pay for content and we imagine if you get it down to a penny, that's so close to zero, we think it would basically be free." I imagine if someone solved it, there would be some new complaint (li…
> You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small. In theorie you can with "friends and family", but you can't charge a dollar. It costs 2.9% and $0.30 for any transaction. You end up with something like 0.68 before transfer costs to your actual bank.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#186As sometime who has worked full time on this for over 5 years now, I have found a few aspects of your answer: The technical challenges of doing it with credit cards are overwhelming (in CC parlance, a "microtransaction" is anything under $10) due to fee structure. You can simplify this by using a different payment rail (in my case, Lightning over Bitcoin), but now you have a different problem: nobody has Bitcoin. You…
>You can simplify this by using a different payment rail (in my case, Lightning over Bitcoin), but now you have a different problem: nobody has Bitcoin. The problem is that Lightning essentially is a subscription service. The user has to lock much more Bitcoin in a channel in order use Lightning for micro transactions, which defeats the purpose. The minimum fee to get a Bitcoin transaction confirmed in a reasonable a…
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#187People are mentioning technical & payment processing hurdles, but those are all easy to figure out. Look at the gaming industry, mobile app stores, iTunes, online gambling, toll booths, tipping on various online platforms. Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while. A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee…
Is this really true though? Aren't ad prices very very low, how much do those dubious ads pay that appear next to the articles we read? Surely not that much?
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#188People are mentioning technical & payment processing hurdles, but those are all easy to figure out. Look at the gaming industry, mobile app stores, iTunes, online gambling, toll booths, tipping on various online platforms. Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while. A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee…
At the gaming industry, noone i know of that plays chess has implemented this. At Lichess there millions and billions of games played each month and they don't pay with micropayments for each game. Other chess websites charge monthly fee. Micropayments are a hassle for any system that has people, actual human organisms, being responsible for a gazillion of small transactions. The involvement of a human increases the…
When you visit any website, a dozen or so companies are charged tiny amounts of money for showing their ads to you. Charging a single entity, the reader, is much less complicated. So it's not a technical limitation.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#189As sometime who has worked full time on this for over 5 years now, I have found a few aspects of your answer: The technical challenges of doing it with credit cards are overwhelming (in CC parlance, a "microtransaction" is anything under $10) due to fee structure. You can simplify this by using a different payment rail (in my case, Lightning over Bitcoin), but now you have a different problem: nobody has Bitcoin. You…
Micro-transactions require micro-products, and those are a hard sell. Compare a tangible market situation: remember the old Bazooka gum that used to say "3 cents" on each piece? Few customers are going to walk into a store and buy a single piece, no matter how cheap and frictionless payment is. At that level, the burden of thinking "I have to actually go and buy it" exceeds both the financial cost and likely the perc…
The challenge is probably mostly that a lot of publishers would need to get together and create a unified account that could be charged.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#190Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates. Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do i…
The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts from your balance then you don't have the transac…